Epstein Secrets

ocess of control via feedback. (“Cybernetics,” from the ancient Greek for “helmsman,” is the etymological basis of our word “governor,” which is what James Watt called his pathbreaking feedback control device that transformed the use of steam engines.) Because he was immersed in problems of control, Wiener sa

ing a place to begin. New Technologies=New Perceptions Before AI, there was Cybernetics—the idea of automatic, self-regulating control, laid out in Norbert Wiener’s foundational text of 1948. I can date my own serious exposure to it to 1966, when the composer John Cage invited me and four or five other young arts

ntury. 174 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016977 from kuber- to guber—the root of “gubernatorial” and “governor,” another term for masculine control, deployed by James Watt to describe his 19th-century device for modulating a runaway steam engine. Cybernetics thus took ideas that had long analogized people and devices an

agic or mysticism of an earlier age— as by their modern-sounding insights. I detect that same doubleness—the zig-zag origami folds of old and new—in Norbert Wiener’s classic The Human Use of Human Beings. First published in 1950 and revised in 1954, the book is in many ways extraordinarily prescient. Wiener, the M

ocess of control via feedback. (“Cybernetics,” from the ancient Greek for “helmsman,” is the etymological basis of our word “governor,” which is what James Watt called his pathbreaking feedback control device that transformed the use of steam engines.) Because he was immersed in problems of control, Wiener sa

ing a place to begin. New Technologies=New Perceptions Before AI, there was Cybernetics—the idea of automatic, self-regulating control, laid out in Norbert Wiener’s foundational text of 1948. I can date my own serious exposure to it to 1966, when the composer John Cage invited me and four or five other young arts

ntury. 174 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016394 from kuber- to guber—the root of “gubernatorial” and “governor,” another term for masculine control, deployed by James Watt to describe his 19th-century device for modulating a runaway steam engine. Cybernetics thus took ideas that had long analogized people and devices an

agic or mysticism of an earlier age— as by their modern-sounding insights. I detect that same doubleness—the zig-zag origami folds of old and new—in Norbert Wiener’s classic The Human Use of Human Beings. First published in 1950 and revised in 1954, the book is in many ways extraordinarily prescient. Wiener, the M